Intonational Realization of Declarative Questions in Bai

This study investigates intonational realization of declarative questions in Southern Bai, a Sino-Tibetan tone language spoken in the southwest of China, by using a semispontaneous experimental approach. Our data shows that Bai speakers use prosody by lengthening the duration, expanding the pitch span, and raising the pitch maximum and minimum of the sentence-middle constituents to distinguish declarative questions from statements, regardless of focus condition. However, they vary the use of pitch span and pitch minimum with different lexical tones. These results thus suggest that sentence-medial prosody is different between statements and declarative questions in Bai. Furthermore, the modification of prosodic cues for encoding interrogativity appears to be sensitive to lexical tones in Bai.